Over the past few weeks, I have been teaching all about outer space. While the children have loved all the lessons in the unit, this astronaut lesson was definitely their favorite! Here is a picture of me in the astronaut suit that I made myself! I bought a paint suit from Home Depot and attached spray-painted shaving caps and NASA pictures. For the space pack, I rolled up an old roof rack luggage cover and used the attached straps to wear it. The helmet was an old motorcycle helmet that I simply spray-painted and added letter stickers.
For the lesson, I introduced all the parts of the astronaut suit and taught the children all about the life of an astronaut in space. Of course, the burning question on all the students’ minds was about how astronauts go to the bathroom in space. Oh boy, did they think that was funny!
Next, it was time to live like astronauts. Everyone got to taste a piece of freeze dried ice cream. (FYI: For a total of 41 students, 5 bags were plenty for each student to have a taste!) We used adjectives such as, hard, creamy, smooth, and chocolaty to describe the ice cream’s taste, texture, and smell. Then, as a class, we took a vote whether we liked freeze dried or regular ice cream better. We organized our information on a graph like the one pictured here. The winner was regular ice cream. It won by 2 votes!
The following day, the students kept asking more about astronauts. I decided, being that the class just learned about how to write a letter, it would be appropriate and exciting for the children to write letters to an astronaut. So, we did! Here are a couple examples.
